yum

Ahm ed zrchrn at gmail.com
Sat Dec 9 21:19:37 UTC 2006


I'm sure we have all heard about yum's "speed" issues, and yes it is
annyoing, but fc6 went a long way to try to improve this speed. FC6 also saw
yum become even more integrated into fedora (anaconda etc.). And all this
development is good, and don't get me wrong I think yum is a fantastic tool
with many wonderful features. However it's currently still lacking in some
areas.
1. The GUI
pup and pirut are pretty good programs but they are in some ways, a bit
restricting. (for lack of a better word). I think that they should have more
then just a progress bar. They should also output more information about
say, the size of the files. How much (exactly) has been downloaded, and
perhaps at what speed the downloads are going.

2. yum CLI
Yum's CLI is much better than the gui tools at this point, and though it has
gotten better there are some ways that it still needs to improve. The two
areas I find most...upsetting involved the headers and dependency
resolution. The headers are quite large....ok so maybe the biggest they get
is around 400k (if I recall correctly) but when your on a slower connection,
and your upgrading a lot of packages this can be quite annoying. Perhaps
they header files could be placed in a different, smaller, format. Or an
option to download all the header files could be included, and the headers
can be updated then along with the metadata. The other, and in my opinion
more important, area the yum cli should improve is in the resolution of
dependencies, it should be faster. Currently yum seems just as good as
apt-get or smart-pm or packman (arch linux's tool) at resolving dependecies.
Yet all the other package manager do it much faster, almost instantly. I'm
not sure why that is.  It seems that it does each package one by one slowly.
I think this may relate to the way the headers are stored. What makes these
improvements to the cli so important is that if they are done they will
benifit puplet and pirut, as well as anaconda's installation tool. And thus
I view the ClI improvments to be very important.

Please don't misunderstand, I'm not complaining. I'm stating areas that I
(based solely on what I have gathered from my usage of fedora an yum) feel
that yum can improve. A friend of mine along with myself plan to start
looking at the yum code to try to see what we can do to improve yum, with
our basic programming skills. However I decided it would be best to work
directly with the devs on this one.  My goal is to start a discussion on the
issue to see what the fedora devs, especially those involved directly with
yum, had to say about this. And perhaps we can help in this area.

Thank you for your time.
Ahmed G.

p.s. This was the best place I could find to post this, if there is a better
place to do this (a yum-devel list) please notify me and I will take this
there.
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